It’s a strange world. Nicolas Winding Refn‘s film Pusher was released in 1996 and didn’t make a big splash. Years later, when Refn was in dire financial straights he made two sequels, and the attention given to those films helped establish Refn in a much bigger way. Now he’s an internationally famous director and there are two remakes of Pusher out in the world.

The more recent one, the US release for which is yet to be determined, is actually produced by Refn, directed by Luis Prieto and stars Richard Coyle as a guy who finds himself on the wrong end of a bad drug deal and has to make some questionable decisions to survive.

A trailer has just landed for Prieto’s remake, and you can check it out below.

This trailer drove me crazy the first time I watched it. Reason being not just that it looks like a very, very faithful recreation of Refn’s original, but that the actor playing the drug distributor Milo is a dead ringer for Zlatko Buric, who played the character in Refn’s original trilogy. (He’s the lead in the third Pusher.)

Then I realized: this guy doesn’t just look like Zlatko Buric. It IS Zlatko Buric. So Luis Prieto has directed a new version of the film, but in doing so stayed so faithful that he used one of the key actors from the original. That’s an unexpected approach to the film.

Beyond that I’m still not quite sure what the point of this remake really is, but hopefully it will drive people towards Refn’s original series.